Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics

Excavating the history of Marxism and Black revolutionary politics We still have a lot to learn from the politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Andrée Blouin. We might yet build something new from their political thought, something which clings on to the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to let go. 'Provocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures' - Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire 'A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of "decolonial studies" and "Afro-pessimism" is welcome' - Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire 'This is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination' - Firoze Manji, co-editor of Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.